What does the future of Vtubing look like? Cover’s Yagoo has the answer

At the massive Kings Theatre in Brooklyn, New York, the crowd began to scream in anticipation of the concert to begin, but one voice cut through the roar: “Yaaaaaagoooooooooo!”

The event was Hololive’s Breaking Dimensions concert on August 24, a show where digital artists known as Vtubers sing and dance live on stage as holograms. Yagoo, however, is not a Vtuber, but a flesh-and-blood CEO named Motoaki Tanigo. Motoaki heads Cover Corporation, the company that owns and operates Hololive Production, one of the largest Vtuber agencies in the world.

In 2022, people flocked to Vtuber content, with streaming platform Twitch reporting that viewership figures for The Vtubing content increased by 350% compared to compared to the previous year. In the fall of 2023, Cover’s Vtubers had more than 83 million subscribers combinedThis summer, the company performed its second live concert in English, the same weekend as the Anime NYC convention.

But all has not been well. Controversies in the wider Vtuber world have highlighted the tension between talent and the giant agencies that manage them, and independent Vtuber agencies have been criticized for their inflexibility. While other top Vtuber agencies face criticism and some tech CEOs’ reputations are in decline, Motoaki loved by the fandom.

To learn more about the future of Cover and Hololive, Polygon sat down with Motoaki and Max Sung Yoon Kim, Cover’s U.S. sales and licensing director, at Anime NYC. We talked about anime, Motoaki’s dreams for Vtubers, the challenges of bringing Vtubters to the U.S., and the role of fans in expanding the reach of Vtuber content.

(Editorial note: Portions of this interview with Motoaki Tanigo were conducted through interpreters. The transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.)

Polygon: Anime has long been popular in the United States, but interest has increased significantly since the pandemic. Do you think the American interest in anime creates opportunities for Vtubing to grow?

Motoaki Tanigo: In the past 10 years, Japanese anime has doubled in their activities, especially abroad outside Japan. Vtubing is like having your favorite anime avatar streaming live with you. So with that kind of wave, we can surf it to become bigger and bigger.

Polygon: Vtubers’ designs are inspired by anime. Has Cover learned any other lessons from the anime industry in general?

Motoaki Tanigo: In anime, you don’t really have just one main character, right? You have their friends and their group, and what we’ve learned from that is how to debut our unique characters in a unit. So we have a sense of unity and community. And one season of animation can be like one generation, one unit.

Polygon: What do you think is the most important factor in successfully growing Vtubing in a new location? Is it selecting the right talent? Is it finding the right way to bring merchandise to new places? What has been successful for Cover as it has expanded to the US?

Motoaki Tanigo: Everything, (Motoaki laughs). What we are doing now in the American market is not as big as in the Japanese market, because we are in the phase where we have talent and merchandise. But in Japan we have talent, merchandise, music. We work with convenience stores, you name it. So in the future we would like to develop that.

Polygon: Do you have a dream collaboration in the US? Would it be Vtubers at McDonald’s or something like that?

Motoaki Tanigo: (We want) more collaborations in games, because in Japan we’ve done collaborations with Sega and Nintendo. In the US, we hope to have a chance to collaborate with big names like Riot Games.

Polygon: What’s the biggest lesson Cover has learned from expanding talent to English speakers? And has this expansion presented any specific challenges?

Motoaki Tanigo: We have a good working environment for Japanese talent, but we haven’t achieved that yet for our English talent.

Max Sung-Yoon Kim: On the US side, the streaming environments are very different. The types of things that a lot of the usual streamers stream, and what the audience likes, are different. That, and also getting permissions for the games, (can be different). There are a lot of environments around streaming that are different than on the Japanese side.

Polygon: I’ve heard independent Vtubers here in the US — who have grown up in the American content creation ecosystem — say that Vtubing agencies can sometimes be a little restrictive with the types of content they create. I was curious to see if Cover tried to think about this challenge.

Motoaki Tanigo: We have so many choices, right? If you like being indie and being free, that’s a really good option too. But if you’re in an agency, that means you have more venues. You have access to a bigger stage. You can be in a unit. You can go to concerts. You can probably be in movies. So if you want a bigger stage in the future, I think (agency) is a better option for you.

Polygon: With Hololive Productions you create characters, pop stars, gaming content creators, influencers and more. Do you think a successful Vtuber has to do it all? Or do you see opportunities for more niche talent to find their voice?

Motoaki Tanigo: For me, viewers like people who do something really well, who do something at their best, and who try to convey that to their audience. We have gamers. We have entertainers, everything, right? Like in Japan, for example, we have a talent who is really good at art, and that’s how she presents herself. But (the Vtuber industry is) really young. It’s been seven years. So there’s so much potential in the future, and I think we should look forward to that.

Polygon: The expansion of your male cohort Vtubers has been a bit slower. Why is it harder to sell male Vtubers?

Motoaki Tanigo: Our fans that are really into Holostars or male Vtubers are mostly women in Asia. But if you bring it to the American market, the Western market, we have a lot more races, not just Asian. It’s really diverse. So how do we sell to a lot of different races, a lot of different ethnicities, is going to be our big challenge going forward.

Polygon: So the difference in diversity is a bigger challenge in marketing the men of Holostars? Am I hearing that right?

Polygon: I remember scrolling through TikTok during the pandemic and seeing clips from Gawr Gura for the first time. What role do platforms like TikTok play in Cover’s growth?

Motoaki Tanigo: After the pandemic, people will no longer watch streaming services, TikTok or other social media, but user-generated content, such as short videos. That has also become very popular in Japan, so we are trying to leverage that more in the future.

Max Sung-Yoon Kim: It’s not just the importance of TikTok, but with our very engaged fan base, it becomes another way for them to show their support for our brand in an easier way. So I think that’s a really important part of our fandom, given how much we’ve grown so far, and hopefully it’ll help to increase exposure.

Polygon: As we wrap up the interview, I was wondering if there’s anything else you’d like to share with our readers?

Motoaki Tanigo: The Vtubing industry is new, but just like anime in the past few years, we have so many great IP coming out of anime, right? So with those anime collaborating with games and industries, we also look forward to collaborating with many industries in the future.